FEATURE | INTERVIEW | WHAKAKĀINGA / HOME
Written by Sara Mckoy (she/her) | @saramckoy | CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Ko te kāinga kei reira te ngākau. Engāri ehara te kāinga i te wāhi noa. He tangata, he tūrangawaewae, he aronga toi whenuatanga.
The concept of home is not always easy to grapple with. Beyond a physical place—such as where you were born, grew up, or where your family comes from—home can also be an experience of safety and familiarity. For many, it is a place, a person, or an idea to which they can return when seeking a sense of belonging.
The meaning of whakakāinga, to establish a home, differs across cultural lines. In te ao Māori, the notion of tūrangawaewae, a place where one has the right to stand and reside, is a central part of how Māori conception of home links to a larger narrative. Identifying with the mountains, rivers and geographical place that one is from also grounds the sense of belonging for Indigenous peoples in a location. In the Western tradition, home has a literal bricks-and-mortar connotation, which is paired with a more transcendent sentiment of home, expressed by the old adage ‘home is where the heart is’. The household is also often conceptualised as a place of manaakitanga — hospitality and generosity towards guests—as in many Middle Eastern cultures, where a balance is sought between the security and privacy of a home and its social function. In contrast, while the notion of home or whakakāinga implies the setting of roots in a place one expects to return, nomadic conceptions of home are tethered to connections to people, feelings and objects, that remain strong outside of a physical location.
Whatever idea of kāinga best aligns with your own experiences, a loss of your relationship with your ‘home’ can abruptly force you to redefine your sense of belonging. The nature of one’s deeply personal experiences and perspectives attached to the idea of home can make this an isolating road. Every person I asked about this topic reflected on the unique and sensitive confrontations that characterised their disconnection and reconnection with the concept of home. Three of those people shared more deeply with me about how they are working to rebuild their sense of home against a backdrop of severance.
The first was Jade, a Kiwi-American who moved to New Zealand from the United States when she was eleven. Jade recently lost her childhood home, along with many of the noteworthy landmarks of her old neighbourhood — her school and the houses of friends — in the Palisades fires.
“Home is more broad for me than just the place I grew up, but at the same time, where I grew up is very important to my sense of home, I still remember all the addresses I’ve lived at”
More than five and a half thousand homes are thought to have been lost in the ‘firestorms’ which tore through Palisades earlier this year. Jade recalled the critical days in which her friends were forced to flee as their neighbourhood perished.
“There are always fires, every year there are photos of ash up in the hills. But the morning of the Palisades fires, [my friend] sent another photo and it looked worse than before… [later that day] my friends started to evacuate… then hours later we turn on the American news and everything was on fire… it was so weird because I had been so far away from it for so long… but I remember walking around my neighbourhood just the year before when we’d visited thinking ‘i want to live here, I want to raise kids here’.”
In the span of several hours, home transformed from a place that held the nostalgia of childhood to a neighbourhood in ruins.
“It will rebuild of course but it won’t ever be the same… all those niche little places, everywhere I had memories, they’re burnt, they’re gone…”
For Jade, the act of whakakāinga has evolved from establishing roots in a place — although the places she feels connected to are still an important aspect of ‘home’ — but focussing more on the people she shared those places and experiences with.
“I think [home] evolves into being less than one place that I lived, and more of the community that I found while I was there… I would much rather lose my whole house and everything in it than someone who is important to me, who is home for me”
My brother Koby spoke to me about the concept of home in a context of total disconnection. For him, home is Taranaki — the place our family is from and the landmark that adorned our house growing up. But for Koby, being born in Australia after our family uprooted and moved away from Taranaki, his relationship with home has been difficult to reconcile.
“If someone asks where I’m from I instinctively say New-Zealand, but every time I say that I realise that’s not quite true… [but] I feel naturally connected to Taranaki, to New-Zealand, that just feels like where home is for me.”
Koby described home as anything he could associate with New-Zealand. His desire to reconnect with the place he perceives as home is anchored in a feeling of being on the outside of an identity he didn’t have the chance to immerse in.
“I feel like I’m standing at the gate of this whole world that’s waiting to reveal itself, once I find that connection to place, I can reconnect with who I am in myself.”
Whakakāinga resonated with Koby as an opportunity to reestablish a sense of belonging to New-Zealand no matter where he is in the world. Learning about tikanga Māori and taking reo Māori classes have also helped him build a bridge between his sense of belonging and the country he feels disconnected from.
“[Understanding te ao Māori] helps me to appreciate the values and ideas of the country, it feels like a way to express my heritage, to express my identity… I want to feel like I belong to somewhere, like I’m not just a fake kiwi”.
30 year old Loa, who recently moved across the world to Aotearoa from Germany, described a strong grounding of home as internal, rather than any place she’s lived or identifies with.
Born in Peru, adopted to parents in Luxembourg, then living ten years of her adult life in Berlin, home is not just one place Loa pinpoints on a map.
“My home is just where my fixed bed is.”
For Loa, her sense of belonging has also crucially been connected to other people. Where she felt she could develop deep relationships, like with friends at school or roommates in a new city, it was easier to feel grounded. But experiences of racism in Germany shifted her sense of belonging into a sense of unease.
“After six years in Berlin I felt more like that was my home [than Luxembourg]...” but after numerous instances of receiving racial abuse, “I didn’t feel welcome anymore — and I couldn’t talk to anyone because all my friends are white. They could listen to what I was going through but they couldn’t hear me…”
Despite her love and connection to the people and places she had gotten to know over several years in Germany, her negative experiences there, paired with her loss of connection with Luxembourg after so many years away, made it difficult for her to really identify with Berlin as home. This was an isolating ordeal for Loa.
“I felt so lonely in my sadness.”
Moving to New-Zealand was an opportunity for her to redefine what and where home is. The main way she establishes a sense of belonging is through meeting new people, but also feeling a sense of familiarity wherever she is.
“I want the daily things here… to drive down the street and recognise everything… to connect with people on a deeper level”
Even as her definition of home grows and changes, Loa returns to the idea of home as a quotation she read in a book, “Home is where I don’t have to explain myself.”
Whatever your conception of home, whether any of these stories resonate with you, this kōrero reflects the deeply personal nature that whakakāinga often assumes. Despite the divergence of experiences surrounding this topic, it is clear that home transcends the walls of the houses we live in. Home flows from the mountains and rivers that we use to identify ourselves; home resides in the people we love and connect with wherever we are in the world; home is the stories, memories and experiences that ground our sense of selves.
Ki te whakakāinga, ko te kimi ko wai koe.
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